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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of April, 2005.
Viewing ALL NEWS articles 1 through 75 of 135.
- Officially, President Bush won November’s election by 2.5%, yet exit polls showed Kerry winning by 3%. According to a report to be released today by a group of university statisticians, the odds of a discrepancy this large between the national exit poll and election results happening by accident are close to 1 in a million.
- A commission appointed by President Bush to analyze intelligence failures will be releasing its report today. The report "includes a searing critique of how the CIA and other agencies never properly assessed Saddam Hussein's political maneuverings or the possibility that he no longer had weapon stockpiles." But despite its criticism, the report serves to protect the Bush administration.
- Like the new Woody Allen movie, "Melinda and Melinda," it is possible to view today's big story on the tremendous intelligence failures before the Iraq war as either comedy or tragedy, depending on how you look at it.
- If American forces aren't pulling out of Iraq in a year, a draft will be needed to meet manpower requirements, military analysts warned Wednesday.
- Security fears mount as the line between cops and robbers blurs. The masked robbers wore green military fatigues, brandished AK-47 guns and, according to neighbours, escaped in a Toyota Landcruiser with tinted windows - vehicle of choice for Afghan army commanders, former Mujahideen fighters and senior government officials.
- Why we'll never see the second round of Abu Ghraib photos. NBC News reported that they show "American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys." Everyone who saw the photographs and videos seemed to shudder openly when contemplating what the reaction would be when they eventually were made public. - President Bush has nominated the vice president's son-in-law, Philip J. Perry, as general counsel of the Homeland Security Department, where he would oversee 1,500 lawyers who work on legal matters like Coast Guard maritime laws and immigration.
- Late last year, in the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, I was contacted by someone close to the Bush administration about the situation in Iraq. The Bush administration was keen on achieving some semblance of stability in Iraq before June 2005. When I asked why that date, the source dropped the bombshell: because that was when the Pentagon was told to be prepared to launch a massive aerial attack against Iran.
- An assault on jail results in 18 U.S. casualties. A group of 40 to 60 insurgents attacked the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq late Saturday in a well-coordinated assault that inflicted 18 American casualties, U.S. military officials told NBC News
- The case of the mysterious suicide of Raymond Lemme of the Florida Inspector General's office was reopened by Valdosta, Georgia police. Last December computer programmer Clint Curtis made a a sworn affidavit charging that he had built a "vote-rigging software prototype" at the request of Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL)! Lemme was the first official from the FL Inspector General's office to investigate the charges originally made by Curtis.
- The war crimes and atrocities commited by American Troops are ignored by the mainstream news. However much the US wants to make these stories go away, "These are the stories that will continue to emerge from the rubble of Fallujah for years. No, for generations..."
- This story has a link to the video of Clint Curtis's statements about how he created a rigged voting machine prototype. These allegations were being investigated by Mr. Lemme when he was found "suicided" (a previous story listed here). You can watch the video. - Aftermath: Complicity of Liberal Canada to Terrorize Citizens
- The average American in the year 2005 lives a fragile existence, in a struggle for survival that can be ended by missing a few paychecks. The carrot at the end of the stick which was formerly known as "the American dream" has been replaced by a whip that can best be described as the American nightmare of homelessness, and slow, early death.
- Led by Wal-Mart's longtime opponents in organized labor, a new coalition of about 50 groups - including environmentalists, community organizations, state lawmakers and academics - is planning the first coordinated assault intended to press the company to change the way it does business.
- Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, has defied international and Palestinian objections to go ahead with a bitterly controversial plan to expand the largest Jewish settlement on the West Bank by 3,500 homes.
- Venezualan government cracks down on delinquet oil companies. Only 10 percent of all 33 oil operation agreements in the oil-rich nation have paid income taxes this year, Vielma Mora said. The remainder have declared no gains or have claimed losses during the past fiscal year, he said. "We don't understand how Venezuela's state oil company has earned profits and paid taxes, but private companies are declaring losses". - The wife and daughter of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, have been paid more than $500,000 since 2001. "It's DeLay Inc...if it's not illegal, it certainly is inappropriate for members of Congress to use their positions to enrich their families."
- Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's conservative coalition suffered a staggering setback in local elections on Monday, losing several regions. His center-right coalition had lost all but 2 of the 13 regions (of 20) where elections were held. - As representatives of a superpower devoted to (and enamored with) war, it's hardly surprising that the Pentagon and allied corporations are forever planning more effective ways to kill, maim, and inflict pain - or that they plan to keep it that way.
- In Chile, a football stadium in Santiago was turned into a killing field when thousands of trade unionists were herded into it and many executed. Is the USA planning to repeat this in Venezuala?
- Americans will need passports to re-enter the United States from Canada, Mexico, Panama and Bermuda by 2008, part of a tightening of U.S. border controls in an era of terrorist threat. - It was a good year for the global billionaires’ club. Their ranks grew to 691, up 17 percent from the previous year. However, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of impoverished Americans rose 3.7 percent in 2003. The number of children living in poverty rose 6.6 percent. So there are about 100 more billionaires, but 12 MILLION more americans living in poverty. Is that an economic success story? - Led by Sam Walton's only daughter, Alice, the family spent $3.2 million on lobbying. That's more than double what it spent in the previous two elections combined, public documents show. The Waltons have joined a coterie of wealthy families trying to save fortunes through permanent repeal of the estate tax. - Perhaps we can change the world without taking power. Perhaps we can not. The starting-point - for all of us, I think - is uncertainty, not knowing, a common search for a way forward. - About 304 recalcitrant U.S. soldiers, soldiers asking what they are doing in Iraq and why they are killing innocent civillians, have been killed by the Pentagon’s special team, intelligence sources in Iraq have revealed.
- Palestinians are furious over plans to dump 100,000 tonnes of refuse. Israel's plans to dump 10,000 tonnes of rubbish in the West Bank each month may damage Palestinians’ water supplies and some of their most fertile olive-growing land. - Walmart has inexpensive products that save us money...right, or do Walmart stores in our areas end up costing us money?
- They raped me on one day more than nine times. Can you comprehend? Imagine one of your sisters being raped. Why can’t you all imagine it, as I am your sister. With me are 13 girls, all unmarried. All have been raped before the eyes and ears of everyone.
- A gang of dark, ravenously greedy, willfully primitive souls have seized control of the U.S. government by illicit means in 2000 and maintained that control through rampant electoral corruption in 2004. The re-election of President Bush last November was a deliberately shambolic process that saw massive lockouts of opposition voters; unverifiable returns compiled by easily hackable machines operated by avowed corporate partisans of the ruling party; and vast discrepancies between exit polls and final results - Shadowy lobbyists ignore rules and exploit connections -- and their industry of influence nets almost $13 billion.
- Government specialists are busy measuring the growing lines at soup kitchens and food pantries across the nation. There were 25.5 million supplicants regularly lining up in 2002; they were joined by 1.1 million more the next year. And even more arrive as unemployment and other government programs run out. - Some of America's wealthiest individuals have declined billions of dollars in tax cuts bestowed upon them by President George W. Bush's administration and have urged others among the country's richest and most famous to donate their federal tax cuts to campaigns against the Bush package, often described as "tax breaks for the rich." - The giant retailer's CEO says the company's foes are taking cheap shots and telling lies and Wal-Mart will fight back. - A Profoundly Rightwing Pope. - Lobbyists have spent billions of dollars to influence the US Congress and government since 1998, twice the amount spent to elect lawmakers, a watchdog group said.
- A group of top US scientists, including nine Nobel Prize winners, called on Congress Thursday to stop funding deployment of interceptor missiles for a controversial ground-based missile defense system, saying it was incapable of defending against a real attack.
- When his image flashed on a huge outdooor TV screen, the multitude gathered for the funeral of Pope John Paul II had a pointedly unpleasant message to communicate to the U.S. president.
- Material Progression has Often Been Accompanied by Moral Regression . - As the Defense Department begins to look beyond the war in Iraq, a major priority will be to commence a systematic realignment of US forces and bases abroad. This massive undertaking will result in a substantial reduction of American forces in Germany and South Korea, and the establishment of new facilities in Eastern Europe, the Caspian Sea basin, Southeast Asia and Africa. - On Monday, Montana became the fifth state to officially condemn the USA Patriot Act. Joining Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont--not to mention more than 375 local governments--Montana's state legislature passed the strongest statewide resolution against the Patriot Act yet, according to the ACLU. - Secretary Gutierrez stated that America is experiencing "tremendous economic prosperity." Really? What America is Secretary Gutierrez living in? - The Supreme Court rejected Wal-Mart Canada's fight to keep a "union prevention handbook" away from the labour board probing its conduct in Saskatchewan. - The following are excerpts from a speech given by Hugo Chávez at Gigantinho Stadium during the 2005 World Social Forum. "One of these old guys, he was being ripped into pieces, pulled by horses from each arm and leg – Empires have always been brutal, there are no good or bad Empires, they are all aberrant, brutal, perverse, no matter what they wear or how they speak. When he felt he was about to die, he shouted "I die today but some day I’ll return and I’ll be millions". - United States and Iraqi forces are holding a record 17,000 men and women-most without being formally charged - and with those in Iraqi-controlled jails living often in deplorable conditions, said US and Iraqi officials. - Latino immigrants - especially from Mexico, but also from Ecuador, Guatemala and elsewhere - have settled everywhere from Yonkers to Peekskill and Mount Kisco to Mamaroneck. The men continue to follow the established pattern of taking day-laborer jobs in construction and landscaping; the women are usually domestic workers. - We are number one...We are number one.....or are we?
- Enough with the sentimentality of what a good job American troops are doing in Iraq. They are carrying out a disturbed policy invented by mad men. They are trained to kill and to enjoy the killing. They are generally ignorant, abusive, hostile, violent and stupid in their actions.
- The world as we know it, and have known it since the 15th century, is reaching a dichotomous moment. This has been brought on by Capitalism, the dominant economic and development model to this point. Humanity is at a junction, where it can either choose a more sane and sustainable future for all, or it can choose the path of annihilating other nations in order to steal their resources until there are no resources left - America has a broken electoral system but the mainstream press says "Get over it".
- Inflation has outpaced the rise in salaries for the first time in 14 years. And workers are paying a bigger share of the cost of their healthcare. - Residents of the tiny provincial capital of Saudi Arabia's northernmost province last week witnessed a grisly scene in the main public square: the corpses of three militants tied to poles, on top of which were placed their severed heads.
- Ariel Sharon’s military attache presented aerial photos of Iranian nuclear installations during the Israeli prime minister’s summit with US President George W. Bush, Israeli public radio reported on Tuesday. - The largest U.S. grocery union has filed a complaint against Wal-Mart Stores Inc., asking the National Labor Relations Board to investigate whether the retailer "bribed" employees to block union activities. - Clinton has become a member of the Bush clan. Like many relationships in public life, the friendship between Bill Clinton and the Bush family is both genuine and opportunistic. - Will the Bush administration order the US military to attack Iran or Syria?
- The Internal Revenue Service estimates that 132 million individual income tax returns will be filed and that two trillion dollars will be collected for the US Treasury. But in protest of the federal government's military expenditures, an estimated 10,000 people will not file their taxes or will deliberately withhold money from the IRS this year - The Department of Education is considering a plan to maintain files on virtually every college and university student in the country: 15 million students from 6,000 schools. - The first high-level contact between Washington and the fledgling Iraqi transitional government came Monday, with an emergency flight to Baghdad by US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - All steel construction experts outside will confirm that the construction steel which was used in the WTC towers, starts melting at 2800 degrees. And that’s steel without any fireproofing to be "blown off". Furthermore: globally the "fuel experts" will confirm that jet fuel will NOT burn any hotter than 1517 - degrees under those circumstances, whoever is spinning and/or fanning.
- "Neither congressional hearings or repeated petitions calling for a ban have stopped aspartame manufacturers from exposing the public to this sweet poison. In fact, aspartame producers are reporting increased sales and boasting the marketplace addition of 'neotame,' a new aspartame product" - Environmentalists were aghast last week upon discovering that the Bush administration's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had weakened otherwise stringent new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines on assessing the cancer risk of various chemicals. - To implement their 'final solution' to depopulate 4-5 billion people from the Earth, the world's elite will undoubtedly harness the newly emerging biotech and nanotechnology industries to create a super 'bioweapon' virus creating a global 'kill-off' pandemic through which only they will have the cure. - Molecular biologists and microbiologists are being murdered. The official silence on the question of how so many microbiologists and top experts in infectious diseases could die in such a short time span is deafening.
- More than 10,000 fugitives wanted for murder, rape, child abuse and other crimes have been arrested in the largest coordinated crackdown by federal, state and local law enforcement officials in history. This requires the same high level coordination and surveillance that occurs in third world countries when activists are rounded up. - The chief executives of major U.S. corporations enjoyed double-digit pay raises last year, adding to a record of 'jaw-dropping' compensation largely undisturbed by recent years' falling profits and share prices and a wave of scandals involving management chicanery, the country's leading labor federation said in a new survey. - Chanting "No! No to terrorism!" and "No! No to America," thousands of Iraqis called Saturday for American forces to withdraw from Iraq, staging a massive protest at the same square where two years ago to the day protesters pulled down a towering statue of ousted Saddam Hussein. - Some Americans have joined an e-mail war on Big Oil to protest record high gasoline prices, calling for a long-term boycott of the nation's leading fuel retailer ExxonMobil. - The US and Britain are partly to blame for the scandal enveloping the UN oil-for-food programme, Secretary General Kofi Annan has said. "The bulk of the money that Saddam [Hussein] made came out of smuggling outside the oil-for-food programme, and it was on the American and British watch," Mr Annan said.
- Documents obtained by CNN reveal the United States knew about, and even condoned, embargo-breaking oil sales by Saddam Hussein's regime, and did so to shore up alliances with Iraq's neighbors.
- Terrorist groups have neither the capacity nor the ambition to produce weapons of mass destruction, former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has said at a conference in Helsinki. - Thousands of people rioted Sunday in a village in southeastern China, overturning police cars and driving away officers who had tried to stop elderly villagers from protesting against pollution from nearby factories - In the words of another US oil company executive, "it all turned out a lot more complicated than anyone had expected". Instead of the anticipated post-invasion rapid expansion of Iraqi production (an expectation of an additional 2 million barrels/day entering the world market by now), the continuing violence of the insurgency has prevented Iraqi exports from even recovering to pre-invasion levels. - Bigger tax breaks for wealth produces a system in which the middle class pays about the same as the rich. - According to Bush and his neo-cons, "The emerging axis of subversion forming between Cuba and Venezuela must be confronted before it can undermine democracy in Colombia, Nicaragua, Bolivia, or another vulnerable neighbor."
Pages for April, 2005
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